The Clinton Cash-for-Favors Program

My long, authoritative article in today's FrontPage magazine:

The Clinton Cash-for-Favors Program

By Matthew Vadum

Professional leftists are going berserk over a yet-to-be-released book documenting the breathtaking graft and anticipatory bribes that foreign governments and mega-multinationals gave the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s years at the State Department.

This progressive apoplexy is being generated by a bombshell of a book that won’t even hit the bookstands for another 10 days. The opus terrifying left-wingers isClinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by acclaimed best-selling author Peter Schweizer.

The most disturbing allegation to emerge thus far from the book is that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her blessing to a financial transaction that handed partial control of America’s strategically important uranium resources to Vladimir Putin’s Russia after investors paid off her husband and gave huge donations to the Clinton Foundation.

“While the United States gets one-fifth of its electrical power from nuclear plants, it produces only around 20 percent of the uranium it needs, and most plants have only 18 to 36 months of reserves,” the New York Times reports, citing Marin Katusa, chief energy investment strategist for Casey Research.

The newspaper’s report on the shady Canadian company Uranium One, which controls some U.S. uranium facilities, “is based on dozens of interviews, as well as a review of public records and securities filings in Canada, Russia and the United States.” The newspaper acknowledges that “[s]ome of the connections between Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation were unearthed by Peter Schweizer … [who] provided a preview of material in the book to The Times, which scrutinized his information and built upon it with its own reporting.”

From 2005 through 2011 investors in Uranium One reportedly donated to the Clinton Foundation. In 2010 Bill Clinton took $500,000 from an investment bank to give a speech in Russia. The bank had a “buy” rating on Uranium One stock and connections to the Russian government. Eventually the Kremlin gained 100 percent control over Uranium One through a subsidiary of Rosatom, a corporation owned by the Russian government.

Secretary Clinton was supposed to disclose the millions of dollars that the chairman of Uranium One gave to her foundation through his family foundation while various agencies within the Obama administration were reviewing the deal.

So now the expansionist successor nation to the Soviet Union, which seeks to revive its old empire, controls a large swath of American uranium that is needed to produce nuclear weapons. Multiple federal agencies apart from the State Department signed off on the deal, so it is inconceivable that President Obama did not know about the circumstances that led to the Russian takeover of Uranium One. And remember that Obama, who is now working hard to help the Islamic Republic of Iran get nuclear weapons, was caught on a hot mike at a nuclear summit in March 2012 assuring then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, “After my election I have more flexibility.”

Because this scandal involves the energy sector, “this is Teapot Dometimes 10,” radio host Mark Levin said yesterday, alluding to the infamous 1920s corruption saga involving the secret leasing of federal oil reserves that unfolded during the administration of Warren G. Harding. Although President Harding, a Republican, is not thought to have participated in the unlawful activities, senior administration officials were involved. The scandal took a great toll on the president’s well-being and he died before all the facts came out.

Clinton Campaign Chaos

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Clinton Campaign Chaos

By Matthew Vadum

Democrat dowager Hillary Clinton has had a rough few days since she launched her inevitable presidential campaign Sunday with a vapid, vacuous, class warfare-oriented video on YouTube that pushed all the right politically correct buttons.

Charles Krauthammer mocked ^[1] Mrs. Clinton and her ongoing tour of flyover country. She wants to get the big money out of politics, he said, but she is aiming to generate an unprecedented campaign war chest of $2.5 billion.

“She has been taking in money ever since she took the silverware from the White House when they left in 2001,” Krauthammer said. “I mean, it really is a stretch. I just find this rather amusing. This is her Marie Antoinette cake tour.”

“The problem with her is the inauthenticity has reached a point where nothing you see is believable,” the conservative columnist said. “Even if she were sincere about anything you wouldn’t be able to tell it.”

The disastrous campaign rollout ought to embolden other potential Democratic challengers such as former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and former Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.). It sends a message that no matter how ruthless and determined Mrs. Clinton may be, she’ll never be ready for prime time.

Of course, this is as it should be.

The launch video echoes the chaotic craziness of Clinton’s term as secretary of state in which the Obama administration set the Middle East and North Africa on fire, encouraged Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, linked arms with Iran’s murderous mullahs, gave a boost to authoritarian left-wing states in Latin America, and alienated allies from London to Tokyo while freeing dangerous Islamic militants so they can kill more Americans.

With its sense of unreality and air that things really aren’t so bad in Obama’s America, it also foreshadows the moral darkness, statist mediocrity, and irreversible decay that will be America’s fate should the more collectivist of the Clintons return to the White House.

Hillary Joins the Ferguson Lynch Mob

My article from the Aug. 29, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Hillary Joins the Ferguson Lynch Mob

By Matthew Vadum

Breaking her calculated silence on the issue, Hillary Clinton said young Michael Brown was a victim of police brutality in Ferguson, Mo., the latest in a long line of helpless black victims mowed down by racist cops who are part of America’s corrupt criminal justice system.

It’s just more left-wing sloganeering, staples of which are knee-jerk cop hatred and making excuses for black criminals.

Clinton, wife of the man some used to call America’s “first black president,” has a long history of race-baiting and race-based pandering. She patronized black Americans in her insultingly awful mock African-American accent when she gave her infamous “I don’t feel no ways tired” speech.

The all-but-declared candidate for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president’s media-hyped public epiphany about Ferguson and Michael Brown comes days after 18-year-old Brown was laid to rest following a grotesque political rally led by the abominable racial arsonist Al Sharpton.

The former U.S. secretary of state embraces the politically correct lie that a helpless 6’4″ 292-lbs. Brown was shot in cold blood, arms raised while attempting to surrender to white police officer Darren Wilson, instead of the less convenient truth that Brown was trying to crush the decorated cop’s skull with his bare hands and reaching for the man’s handgun. Left-wingers like Clinton also prefer to ignore that fact that minutes before he attacked Wilson, Brown was captured on video bullying a much smaller East Indian shopkeeper during a robbery, an act that some might consider a hate crime. And the public is still waiting for Brown’s not-yet-released postmortem toxicology report.

The myth that Brown was a gentle giant won’t die. The racial-grievance industry, egged on by President Obama and his fellow radicals, won’t let it go. They need rampant racial tension and cop-hatred to persist in order to motivate their political base if Democrats are to have any hope of maintaining control of the U.S. Senate after the November congressional elections.

Hillary, the Left-Wing Money Machine and a New IRS Crackdown

My article from the April 25, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Hillary, the Left-Wing Money Machine and a New IRS Crackdown

By Matthew Vadum

The Internal Revenue Service has revoked the charitable status of a conservative nonprofit group that disseminated statements critical of Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry a decade ago.

This is President Obama’s unambiguous warning shot calculated to intimidate conservative activists ready to work against Hillary Clinton if she decides to seek the presidency.

And it is the latest outrage committed by an administration that has been on a vindictive rampage in recent years, using the feared tax collection agency to vex and persecute its political enemies, especially those associated with the Tea Party movement. And yet, absurdly enough, President Obama claimed in a Super Bowl weekend interview that there has not been even “a smidgen of corruption” at the IRS under his watch.

All of this is a sobering reminder of how the scales are tipped in favor of the Left. Left-wing nonprofit groups, many of which rely on radical billionaires for funding, vastly outspend conservative groups, which tend to rely more on grassroots donations. Leftist organizations operate with almost complete impunity nowadays, unimpeded as they influence and pervert American politics in an effort to fundamentally transform our republic.

Soros and Hillary Take on America

My Oct. 29, 2013 article from FrontPage Magazine:

Soros and Hillary Take on America

By Matthew Vadum

Radical anti-American billionaire George Soros is going all-in for Hillary Clinton’s yet to be officially declared run for the presidency in 2016.

And because Soros’s wealthy leftist friends often follow his lead, a tsunami of early money may be poised to swamp the former U.S. secretary of state’s zygotic campaign.

Soros is lending his name to the “Ready for Hillary” super PAC, giving $25,000 to snag a co-chair post on the organization’s National Finance Committee. Soros’s political director Michael Vachon confirmed Soros’s involvement with the super PAC.

“George Soros is delighted to join more than one million Americans in supporting Ready for Hillary,” Vachon said. “His support for Ready for Hillary is an extension of his long held belief in the power of grassroots organizing.” (Soros also gave $2,300 to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.)

After pledging for the umpteenth time to abandon electoral politics, Soros keeps allowing himself to be pulled back in. A currency speculator and convicted inside-trader, Soros is a practiced hand-wringer who frequently tells gullible reporters he is getting out of electoral politics altogether. This is his mantra between elections even though he never actually follows through on the threat.

Soros is now spreading his wealth around to help a slew of Democrats in future elections.

In addition to the “Ready for Hillary” donation, so far In 2013 Soros has given: $1,500 to challenger Sean Eldridge (D-NY19); $2,600 to Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.); $2,600 to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.); $20,000 to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; and $2,500 to Sen. Al Franken’s (D-Minn.) campaign, along with a separate $2,500 to the political committee, Franken MVPs.

Soros has also given more than $100 million to groups that support “immigrant rights,” immigration amnesty, and open borders since 1997. The idea is to flood America with reliably Democratic future voters who will support Soros’s extreme policy agenda.